Parliamentarians in Iran have passed a bill to protect the rights of children which includes a clause that allows a man to marry his adopted daughter and while she is as young as 13 years.

Activists have expressed alarm that the bill, approved by parliament on Sunday, opens the door for the caretaker of a family to marry his or her adopted child if a court rules it is in the interests of the individual child.

Iran’s Guardian Council, a body of clerics and jurists which vets all parliamentary bills before the constitution and the Islamic law, has yet to issue its verdict on the controversial legislation.

To the dismay of rights campaigners, girls in the Islamic republic can marry as young as 13 provided they have the permission of their father. Boys can marry after the age of 15.

In Iran, a girl under the age of 13 can still marry, but needs the permission of a judge. At present, however, marrying stepchildren is forbidden under any circumstances.

As many as 42,000 children aged between 10 and 14 were married in 2010, according to the Iranian news website Tabnak. At least 75 children under the age of 10 were wed in Tehran alone.

Shadi Sadr, a human rights lawyer with the London-based group Justice for Iran, told the Guardian she feared the council would feel safe to put its stamp of approval on the bill while Iran’s moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, draws the attention of the press during his UN visit to New York.

“This bill is legalising paedophilia,” she warned. “It’s not part of the Iranian culture to marry your adopted child. Obviously incest exists in Iran more or less as it happens in other countries across the world, but this bill is legalising paedophilia and is endangering our children and normalising this crime in our culture.”

She added: “You should not be able to marry your adopted children, full stop. If a father marries his adopted daughter who is a minor and has sex, that’s rape.”

According to Sadr, officials in Iran have tried to play down the sexual part of such marriages, saying it is in the bill to solve the issue of hijab [head scarf] complications when a child is adopted.

An adopted daughter is expected to wear the hijab in front of her father, and a mother should wear it in front of her adopted son if he is old enough, Sadr said.

“With this bill, you can be a paedophile and get your bait in the pretext of adopting children,” Sadr said. Some experts believe the new bill is contradictory to Islamic beliefs and would not pass the Guardian Council.

An initial draft of the bill, which had completely banned marriage with adopted children, was not approved by the council and it is feared that MPs introduced the condition for marriage to satisfy the jurists and clergymen. This is why Sadr fears it can pass the council this time.

The bill has prompted backlash in Iran with the reformist newspaper, Shargh, publishing an article warning about its consequences. “How can someone be looking after you and at the same time be your husband?” the article asked.

Shiva Dolatabadi, head of Iran’s society for protecting children’s rights, has also warned that the bill implies that the parliament is legalising incest. “You cannot open a way in which the role of a father or a mother can be mixed with that of an spouse,” she said, according to Shargh. “Children can’t be safe in such a family.”

Execution of juvenile offenders in Iran has also been in spotlight in recent years amid confusion between the age of majority – when minors cease to be legally considered children – and the minimum age of criminal responsibility, which is 15 for boys and nine for girls under Iranian law.

Sahiwal, Pakistan: Harrappa police have yet to arrest a shopkeeper and his two associates who allegedly tortured a 13-year-old orphan boy to death on Friday night while ‘interrogating’ him in connection with a petty theft.

Waqas Anjum, whose father had died, worked as a helper at the grocery shop owned by Suleman at 105/7-R village. His widow mother is a daily-wager.

On Thursday night, a theft occurred in the shop of Suleman who called a khoji (a person who claims he can trace a thief by following footprints) next day to resolve the matter.

According to locals, the khoji after inspecting the crime scene told Suleman that Waqas was the thief. At this, the shop owner, along with two influential men of his Biradri – Khalid and Muzammil – went to Waqas’ house on Friday night and asked his mother to hand over the boy for ‘interrogation’. The poor widow had no other option but to obey them.

The three men brought the boy to the shop and started subjecting him to severe torture.

According to locals, the boy’s cries could be heard outside the shop but nobody intervened. The boy was allegedly subjected to torture for some seven hours and finally fell unconscious.

As his condition deteriorated, the accused left him at his house and fled away. The boy reportedly died while being shifted to the hospital.

Sources said the medical report issued by the District Headquarters Hospital confirmed the boy’s neck was broken.

Harrappa police allegedly tried to use delaying tactics but later on the insistence of locals a murder case (FIR 443/13) was registered against three accused. All the three accused were still at large.

Alamadar Husain, the head of district core group of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), brought the matter into the notice of District Police Officer Syed Khurram Ali, demanding immediate arrest of the accused.

Investigating Officer Malik Masood said police were conducting raids on the possible hideouts of the accused.

Two months ago, a young mother of two was stoned to death by her relatives on the order of a tribal court in Pakistan. Her crime: possession of a mobile phone.

Arifa Bibi’s uncle, cousins and others hurled stones and bricks at her until she died, according to media reports. She was buried in a desert far from her village. It’s unlikely anyone was arrested. Her case is not unique. Stoning is legal or practised in at least 15 countries or regions. And campaigners fear this barbaric form of execution may be on the rise, particularly in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Women’s rights activists have launched an international campaign for a ban on stoning, which is mostly inflicted on women accused of adultery. They are using Twitter and other social media to put pressure on the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, to denounce the practice.

“Stoning is a cruel and hideous punishment. It is a form of torturing someone to death,” said Naureen Shameem of the international rights group Women Living Under Muslim Laws. “It is one of the most brutal forms of violence perpetrated against women in order to control and punish their sexuality and basic freedoms.”

She said activists will also push the UN to adopt a resolution on stoning similar to the one passed last year on eradicating female genital mutilation – another form of violence against women often justified on religious and cultural grounds.

Stoning is not legal in most Muslim countries and there is no mention of it in the Koran. But supporters argue that it is legitimised by the Hadith – the acts and sayings of the Prophet Mohamed. Stoning is set out as a specific punishment for adultery under several interpretations of sharia or Islamic law. In some instances, even a woman saying she has been raped can be considered an admission to the crime of zina (sex outside marriage).

In one case cited by Shameem, a 13-year-old Somali girl, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, was buried up to her neck and stoned by 50 men in front of 1,000 people at a stadium in Kismayu in 2008. Her father told Amnesty International she had been raped by three men but was accused of adultery when she tried to report the rape to the al-Shabaab militia in control of the city.

Extrajudicial terror

Iran has the world’s highest rate of execution by stoning. No one knows how many people have been stoned but at least 11 people are in prison under sentence of stoning, according to an Iranian human rights lawyer, Shadi Sadr.

Sadr, who has represented five people sentenced to stoning, said Iran carried out stonings in secret in prisons, in the desert or very early in the morning in cemeteries. “Pressure from outside Iran always helps. The Islamic Republic pretends that they don’t care about their reputation, but they do care a lot,” added Sadr, who lives in exile in Britain.

In 2010, the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a woman sentenced to death by stoning for alleged adultery, caused international outcry. The authorities have suspended her sentence but she remains in prison. Officials withdrew stoning from a new draft penal code last year, but have since reinserted it.

Stoning is also a legal punishment for adultery in Mauritania, a third of Nigeria’s 36 states, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

In some countries, such as Mauritania and Qatar, stoning has never been used although it remains legal. However, in other countries, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, stoning is not legal but tribal leaders, militants and others carry it out extrajudicially. “In Afghanistan, warlords are manipulating religion to terrorise the population for their own political ends. Stoning is one way of doing that,” said Shameem, a human rights lawyer who is co-ordinating the Stop Stoning Women campaign.

Origins

Stoning has been used as a form of community justice throughout history in various religious and cultural traditions, many pre-dating Islam. Unlike beheading, which is performed by a single executioner, stoning is carried out by a group.

The practice has been documented among the Ancient Greeks to punish people judged to be prostitutes, adulterers or murderers. It is also mentioned in the Jewish Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and the Talmud. Today, it is predominantly associated with Muslim culture. However, clerics are deeply divided. Supporters of stoning say the Hadith depicts the Prophet as occasionally ordering stoning in cases of extramarital sex.

But some scholars say these acts and sayings – recorded several hundred years after the Prophet’s death – have been misinterpreted. Others argue that the Prophet was simply following prevailing customs and Jewish law. Modern laws sanctioning stoning as a punishment for adultery emerged with the revival of political Islam in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Discrimination

Campaigners say women are more likely to be convicted of adultery than men because discriminatory laws and customs penalise women more for extramarital sex.

If a man is unhappy with his wife he can – depending on the country – divorce, take other wives or marry another woman temporarily. A woman has few options. She can divorce only in certain circumstances and risks losing custody of her children. Men accused of adultery are also more likely to have the means to hire lawyers, and their greater physical freedom makes it easier for them to flee in situations where they risk extrajudicial stoning.

Activists say trials are often unfair. Convictions are frequently based on confessions made under duress. As adultery is difficult to prove, judges in Iran can also convict on the basis of gut feeling rather than evidence.

Even the manner of stoning is loaded against women. People sentenced to stoning in Iran are partially buried. If they can escape they are spared. But women are customarily buried up to their chests while men are only buried up to their waists.

Stoning contravenes a host of UN treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that no one should be subjected to torture, or cruel or inhuman punishment. The treaty, which Iran and Pakistan have signed, allows countries to execute people only for “the most serious crimes”.

Many prominent Muslim clerics have spoken in support of a ban on stoning, deeming it un-Islamic and antithetical to the Koran’s emphasis on repentance and compassion. Shameem said stoning mostly happened in conflict or post-conflict areas where politicians, warlords and militants exploit people’s religious beliefs as they jockey for power. Mali saw its first case last year after Islamist militants took control of the north of the country. It is not clear why, in Bibi’s case, the tribal court should have justified stoning as a punishment for owning a mobile phone. Shameem said stoning and the threat of stoning was being used “to control women, constrain their freedoms, and police their sexuality”.

The threat of stoning has even happened in Tunisia, a relatively liberal country with no history of stoning. This year, the head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Tunisia called for a teenage activist to be stoned to death for posting nude protest images of herself online.

Campaigners plan to present an online petition to Mr Ban and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on 25 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

In this image taken with a mobile phone, rescue workers and family members gather to identify the shrouded bodies of students brutally murdered following an attack by Islamist extremist on an agricultural college in Gujba, Nigeria, Sunday, Sept. 29, 2013, Suspected Islamic extremists attacked the Yobe State College of Agriculture early Sunday, gunning down students as they slept in dormitories and torching classrooms, leaving some 50 students dead in the attack according to college Provost Molima Idi Mato. The attack is seen as part of an ongoing Islamic uprising in northeastern Nigeria prosecuted by Boko Haram militants in their declared quest to install an Islamic state. (AP Photo)

Several Students Shot… Many Burned Alive.

by, Associated Press (AP)

Potiskum, Nigeria (AP) — Suspected Islamic extremists attacked an agricultural college in the dead of night, gunning down dozens of students as they slept in dormitories and torching classrooms, the school’s provost said, reporting the latest violence in northeastern Nigeria’s ongoing Islamic uprising.

As many as 50 students may have been killed in the assault that began at about 1 a.m. Sunday in rural Gujba, Provost Molima Idi Mato of Yobe State College of Agriculture, told The Associated Press.

“They attacked our students while they were sleeping in their hostels, they opened fire at them,” he said.

He said he could not give an exact death toll as security forces still are recovering bodies of students mostly aged between 18 and 22.

The Nigerian military has collected 42 bodies and transported 18 wounded students to Damaturu Specialist Hospital, 40 kilometers (25) miles north, said a military intelligence official, who insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press.

The extremists rode into the college in two double-cabin pickup all-terrain vehicles and on motorcycles, some dressed in Nigerian military camouflage uniforms, a surviving student, Ibrahim Mohammed, told the AP. He said they appeared to know the layout of the college, attacking the four male hostels but avoiding the one hostel reserved for women.

“We ran into the bush, nobody is left in the school now,” Mohammed said.

Almost all those killed were Muslims, as is the college’s student body, said Adamu Usman, a survivor from Gujba who was helping the wounded at the hospital.

Wailing relatives gathered outside the hospital morgue, where rescue workers laid out bloody bodies in an orderly row on the lawn for family members to identify their loved ones.

One body had its fists clenched to the chest in a protective gesture. Another had hands clasped under the chin, as if in prayer. A third had arms raised in surrender.

Provost Idi Mato confirmed the school’s other 1,000 enrolled students have fled the college.

He said there were no security forces stationed at the college despite government assurances that they would be deployed. The state commissioner for education, Mohammmed Lamin, called a news conference two weeks ago urging all schools to reopen and promising protection from soldiers and police.

Most schools in the area closed after militants on July 6 killed 29 pupils and a teacher, burning some alive in their hostels, at Mamudo outside Damaturu.

Northeastern Nigeria is under a military state of emergency to battle an Islamic uprising prosecuted by Boko Haram militants who have killed more than 1,700 people since 2010 in their quest to install an Islamic state, though half the country’s 160 million citizens are Christian. Boko Haram means Western education is forbidden in the local Hausa language.

United States President Barack Obama on Tuesday described the group as one of the most vicious terrorist organizations in the world, speaking at a meeting with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan at which both reaffirmed their commitment to fight terrorism.

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau last week published a video to prove he is alive and prove false military claims that they might have killed him in an ongoing crackdown.

Government and security officials claim they are winning their war on terror in the northeast but Sunday’s attack and others belie those assurances.

The Islamic extremists have killed at least 30 other civilians in the past week.

Twenty-seven people died in separate attacks Wednesday and Thursday night on two villages of Borno state near the northeast border with Cameroon, according to the chairman of the Gamboru-Ngala local government council, Modu-Gana Bukar Sheriiff.

The military spokesman did not respond to requests for information on those attacks, but a security official confirmed the death toll. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to give information to journalists.

Also Thursday, police said suspected Islamic militants killed a pastor, his son and a village head and torched their Christian church in Dorawa, about 100 kilometers from Damaturu. They said the gunmen used explosives to set fire to the church and five homes.

Meanwhile, farmers and government officials are fleeing threats of imminent attacks from Boko Haram in the area of the Gwoza Hills, a mountainous area with caves that shelter the militants despite repeated aerial bombardments by the military.

A local government official said there had been a series of attacks in recent weeks and threats of more. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his life, said Gwoza town was deserted when he visited it briefly under heavy security escort on Thursday.

He said militants had chased medical officers from the government hospital in Gwoza, which had been treating some victims of attacks. And he said they had burned down three public schools in the area.

The official said the Gwoza local government has set up offices in Maiduguri, the state capital to the north.

More than 30,000 people have fled the terrorist attacks to neighboring Cameroon and Chad and the uprising combined with the military emergency has forced farmers from their fields and vendors from their markets.

The attacks come as Nigeria prepares to celebrate 52 years of independence from Britain on Tuesday and amid political jockeying in the run up to presidential elections next year with many northern Muslim politicians saying they do not want another term for Jonathan, who is from the predominantly Christian south.

Last week the US National Institutes of Health ( NIH) issued an report titled, “Interim Report: Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) working group.” The report has extensively examined President Barack Obama’s brain project, which mentions the need to develop electromagnetic modulation as a new technology for brain circuit manipulation. In the meantime, the weekend edition of the Guardian newspaper in London published an article which explains that brain drugs will likely be replaced by brain circuit manipulation; this is a huge change from drug research to brain circuit research which is now heavily funded and taking off.

“New technologies such as optogenetics suggest that even finer control of brain circuits may be possible,” Vaughan Bell, who is a clinical psychologist and visiting researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, pointed in her article in the Guardian.

“While deep brain stimulation involves stimulating the brain with electrical currents, optogenetics involves injecting neurons with a benign virus that contains the genetic information for light-sensitive proteins. The brain cells then become light sensitive themselves and their activity can be controlled with millisecond flashes of light sent through embedded fibre optic cables. Until now, this has only been demonstrated in animals but there are high hopes that it could lead to precisely controlled treatments in humans that intervene only in carefully selected brain circuits,” she examined.

The Interim Report of NIH on the other hand carefully highlighted that “directly activating and inhibiting populations of neurons, neuroscience is progressing from observation to causation, and much more is possible. To enable the immense potential of circuit manipulation, a new generation of tools for optogenetics, pharmacogenetics, and biochemical and electromagnetic modulation should be developed for use in animals and eventually in human patients. Emphasis should be placed on achieving modulation of circuits in patterns that mimic natural activity.”

The threat is real. The NIH Interim Report is another of many indications that brain technology for neuroweapons is scientifically possible. Additionally, some say such technologies have been used systematically against select people in various jurisdictions. Many definitions on certain precedures and practices have to be revisited due to the many legal loop holes that allow for real criminals to commit illegal activities.

Our latest issue of Torture: Asian and Global Perspectives (Volume 02, Number 2 & 3) features as its main story, the inside story of a US mind control project. Ms. Cheryl Welsh, who is the director of a small human rights organization in the US, has been examining, on an in-depth level, this issue, exclusively for us. It is a privilege for us to present her long term research paper and we believe this will be a worthy contribution to a larger, critical debate on the use of neuroweapons. Currently, the dialectic on the new neuroscience programs is extremely one sided and lacking in an awareness of the likelihood of neuroweapons; there is a great need for a more balanced dialogue on a global level in the future as well.

In this video below, Professor Gregor Noll (Lund, Sweden) explains how neuroscience can be used to develop new weapons systems, and addresses how this may affect the ability of weapon operators to implement international humanitarian law.

1. Conversion, Subjugation, or Death

The Qur’an contains detailed instructions and examples of how to meet unbelievers. The first instruction is that they should be called to Islam; in fact, the Qur’an says you cannot wage war against unbelievers until you have preached to them. The second instruction is that if they do not convert to Islam, then, they must be fought. The third instruction is that if they surrender, or convert, then you must stop waging war. The final instruction is that if they do not convert or surrender, then they must be killed. This is the optimum route for Islamist expansion: A tidal wave of war, subjugation and conversion.

There is another provision in the Qur’an though, because sometimes Muslims aren’t in a position to wage war. In this occasion, the examples and teachings of the Qur’an are that Muslims may make deals with their enemies, with unbelievers, engage in truces and the like in order to recuperate and gain strength. The overriding concern is the fight against unbelievers; if this can’t be achieved then it is ok to strategically lay low. To achieve more sneaky victories, it is acceptable to deceive, double-cross and break deals. Deals with unbelievers are not real deals, anyway, and are to be broken as soon as more aggressive moves can be made.

Robert Spencer, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam” points out that there are over 100 verses in the Qur’an that exhort Muslims to fight unbelievers; this includes ‘chopping their heads off’ (Qur’an 47:4). The verse says that Allah forgives only those who have the right beliefs, and non-believers’ actions will ‘come to nothing’. The reason that such black-and-white morality is permissible is the same reasons that Christians gave during the Dark Ages of Faith: any enemies of Christians were actually Satanic:

“This warfare was only part of the larger spiritual conflict between Allah and Satan: “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil: so fight ye against the friends of Satan” (Qu’ran 4:76)

“Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.” (Qur’an 9:5). The “poor-due” in this verse iszakat, which is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and regulates religious tithes.”

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29). The jizya was a tax inflicted upon non-believers.”

Many more verses continue the theme: Unbelievers are the utmost evil, and to fight them you can therefore use any means. In fact, Muslims have to use any means they can to convert or subjugate nonbelievers. “The unbelievers are your inveterate foe” or “The disbelievers are ever to you a clear enemy” (Qur’an 4:101 – depending on translation). Now, many Muslims in Western countries don’t seem to be doing this… and we will explore why not, later. The verses above from the Qur’an (4:76, 9:29, 9:5, 47:4) and many others affirm that Muslims must fight unbelievers, convert them, or subjugate them. Subjugation always involves non-Muslims paying taxes to Muslims, ‘feel themselves subdued’, and countless other humiliations and restrictions. Hitler forced Jews to wear special signs; the requirements of Islamic rule are much, much worse. Nonbelievers in Muslim lands are restricted so much that they must either convert to Islam just to live, or, they choose to die. This is how the Muslims want it: Any temporary tolerance is a precursor to conversion or increased oppression.

Not all Muslims, however, know the Quran very well. Many do not read it; many cannot read it (many Muslims are not Arabs). But in a general environment where the afterlife becomes such a cultural totem, and the way to get there is to ‘be a Muslim’, it only takes a general anti-Muslim slant in Islam before many pick up on the violent vibes, and take up the sword in order to ascertain their own accession.

“Most Muslims who commit atrocities are explicit about their desire to get to paradise. One failed Palestinian suicide bomber described being “pushed” to attack Israelis by “the love of martyrdom.” He added, “I didn’t want revenge for anything. I just wanted to be a martyr.” Mr Zaydan, the would-be martyr, conceded that his Jewish captors were “better than many, many Arabs.” With regard to the suffering that his death would have inflicted upon his family, he reminded his interviewer that a martyr gets to pick seventy people to join him in paradise. He would have been sure to invite his family along. […]

The believers who stay at home – apart from those that suffer from a grave impediment – are not the equal of those who fight for the cause of God with their goods and their persons. God has given those that fight with their goods and persons a higher rank than those who stay at home. God has promised all a good reward; but far richer is the recompense of those who fight for Him� He that leaves his dwelling to fight for God and His apostle and is then overtaken by death, shall be rewarded by God� the unbelievers are your inveterate enemies.” Koran 4:95-101.

Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences. Many Muslims, for instance, are convinced that God takes an active interest in women’s clothing. While it may seem harmless enough, the amount of suffering that this incredible idea has caused is astonishing. The rioting in Nigeria over 2002 Miss World Pageant claimed over two hundred lives; innocent men and women were butchered with machetes or burned alive simply to keep that troubled place free of women in bikinis. Earlier in the year, the religious police in Mecca prevented paramedics and firefighters from rescuing scores of teenage girls trapped in a burning building. Why? Because the girls were not wearing the traditional head covering that Koranic law requires. Fourteen girls died in the fire; fifty were injured.”

Irrationalism and strange beliefs about what the creator of the universe cares about are not merely oddities; they are cancers of human thought. As human action is normally forethought, superstitious beliefs can and do lead to bloodshed. The West has its own example in history: For hundreds of years learning and free thought were suppressed by the Christian church during the dark ages. Although such beliefs were once a minority, they can fatally undermine entire civilisations.

2. Stealing From the Dhimmi (Westerners)

Sometimes it appears that communities are en masse engaged in strategic anti-Western practices. This begins to verge on the level of conspiracy-theory, but nonetheless there is governmental evidence to back it up. It is best that Bruce Bawer speaks for himself:

“Kheir Sajer, an Oslo Muslim who describes Islamism as a ‘cancer’ in his community, tells of an Oslo imam who has preached that Christians, under sharia law, must pay jizra, the protection tax demanded of all infidels living in Muslim lands: ‘In Norway, they don’t do this. Therefore the Muslims have a right to steal from them. If a Muslim walks straight into a store and steals, it is thus a legitimate act.’ Other Oslo imams, says Sajer, agree. […]

Many immigrants have been extremely successful at exploiting the generosity of Western welfare states […] In Norway, the handouts come in a wide variety of forms – among them public assistance, unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability, cash support, and rent allowance. One reason the Scandinavian welfare system has worked as well as it has is that most Scandinavians have been pretty good about not taking excessive advantage of it. […] To a surprising extent, much of the social security apparatus functions on a sort of honour system: unless you require it, you don’t ask for it.

“After the 2005 terrorist attacks on London, it emerged that the four suspects had raked in more than half a million pounds in welfare benefits from the British government.”

Alas, this is a different kind of honor than many immigrants are familiar with. Most come from poor villages in undeveloped countries with high levels of corruption – a background that tends to breed cynicism, duplicity, and an exceptional skill at manipulating the system. For people with such backgrounds, the goal is to grab everything one can get; only a fool would not take maximum advantage of the kind of bounty that Western Europe offers. Besides, many of them are told by their religious leaders that Muslim law gives them the right to abuse the infidels’ system as much as possible – the right, in Kheir Sajer’s words, to ‘cheat and lie to the countries that harbour them.’ They are told to view the benefits they receive as jizya. […] In Denmark, Muslims make up 5 percent of the population but receive 40 percent of welfare outlays.”

Some state investigations have found large-scale and significant abuses of the system by entire extended families and portions of Muslim communities. Such immigrants often claim on behalf of family and relatives that are actually living in, say, Morocco, and who routinely lie about how many dependents they have.

3. Apostasy

‘Apostasy’ is the act of leaving a religion. It is deconversion. Normally it involves taking up another religion, sometimes it involves the taking up of a stance skeptical of all religions. If deconversion is the result of no longer believing that gods exist, then, the result is atheism. In the context of a discussion of Islam, an ‘apostate’ is someone who has left Islam for whatever reason. Muslims have sometimes converted to Zoroastrianism, Bahai,Christianity and Hinduism. However, the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death.

“The study of other religions is discouraged by the Qur’an in verses (16:106, 88.23f) prescribing punishment for Muslims who give up Islam for another religion; it was generally maintained in the past that the appropriate punishment was death. This is despite the Qur’anic statement that there is no compulsion in religion (2.256)”

It works like this: Muslims must wage war on non-Muslims. But, those non-Muslims can convert in order to avoid slaughter. In history, hundreds of thousands have converted to Islam, normally en masse, in the face of Muslim armies. No other religion has spread so much by the threat of armed force. Now, Muslims know that many convert but don’t really mean it. The crime of apostasy covers this: If you de-convert, then, you can be killed. Also, jihad can be waged against those who do not completely uphold Islamic ideals. These assure that any suppressed communities living in Muslim lands convert along with their children, and cannot de-convert.

Authorities in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia have arrested and tortured people for deconverting, or for teaching non-Islamic religion to others, for example in 2003 October when 22 Christians were tortured for secretly converting from Islam5. In Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and most other Islamic countries, the authorities actively suppress non-Muslims and violence against them is shockingly frequent and nasty.

4. Blasphemy and Islam

Muslims do not allow scholarly study of religion, scientific research, the facts of history or philosophical debate to challenge Islam. Anything that questions or challenges the dogmas of Islam is “blasphemy“, no matter how honest the enquiry. Anyone who wants to study the history of Islam cannot do so whilst living in a Muslim country as a Muslim. You can’t point out that early compilations of Qur’anic texts are different to the ones we now have, you cannot point out that multiple verses in the Qur’an directly contradict scientific findings and that other verses get their history wrong: And you certainly can’t question the motives of Muhammad nor his army. All of that is blasphemy.

“They were therefore ready to respond fervently to the call of the late Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran for the assassination of the secularist author, Salman Rushdie – a British citizen of Indian Moslem origin living in Britain – for daring to write a novel, The Satanic Verses, based partly on a critical view of Islam. The author and his American wife (novelist Marianne Wiggins) had to go into hiding as a result of Khomeini’s transcontinental death sentence in February. Six months later, his wife emerged to say that after moving with him from place to place every few days (fifty-six moves in five months), she had now left Salman, and no longer knew where he was hiding. He himself may never dare to be seen again in public. […]

The book has been publicly burned by Moslem mobs in Britain, many booksellers and libraries have responded to threats of arson and personal attack by withdrawing the book, and some of these threats have now been put into practice.

Thus, several bookshops have been seriously damaged by Moslem fire-raisers � including one shop in central London, Collet’s, that was burnt out in spite of the fact that it had already, under pressure from its intimidated staff, withdrawn the book.

At the beginning of September, a bomb was thrown from a car at the famous West End store Liberty’s, and four passers-by were injured. At that moment, a telephone message claiming responsibility for the incident was received by the police from an obscure Moslem group calling itself “Islamic Concern for Banning the Satanic Verses.” Moslem leaders, while expressing regret that people have been injured, say it is the fault not of the Moslems but of Rushdie and his publishers and booksellers and the British government. […]

The publisher, Penguin Books, owns nine retail bookshops in city centers around the country, and time bombs were planted outside four of these shops during the evening of September 13. A passerby, seeing a man lurking suspiciously in the dark doorway of the shop in York, alerted the local police, who were just in time to clear people from the vicinity, so that when the bomb exploded, causing damage to the building, there were no casualties. Meanwhile, the York police warned their colleagues in the localities of the other eight Penguin bookshops, thus enabling the other three bombs (in Nottingham, Peterborough, and Guildford) to be defused before they exploded.”

Wherever Islam is the state religion, all other religions lose legal protection, and only Islam remains protected. Anything that offends Muslim sensibilities becomes hotspots of violent riots, protests, and murder. Salmon Rushdie went into hiding in the Westafter publishing The Satanic Verses, which was a fictional story based partly on a criticism of the hodge-podge formation of the Qur’an. No matter how minor the superstition is, if it is questioned, Muslims rally together to call themselves oppressed, victimized and offended. This mass reaction scares Westerners and non-Muslims, but, we must not give in to it. It is superstition, paranoia on behalf of Muslims, but much more than that: It is STRATEGY. The Qur’an tells Muslims that ‘oppression is worse than death’, and that anything that challenges Islam, stops people from converting or hinders Muslims is ‘oppression’. They use the word freely, and manipulate the politically-correct politicians and do-gooders of the West. When seen in the context of the brooding and tactical moves that educated Muslims wish to make against unbelievers, any ‘moral outcry’ must be understood to be merely another attempt at increasing the power of Islam. For this reason, I embrace all blasphemy.

His next scheduled court appearance is Thursday in Brooklyn.

According to federal prosecutors, Choudhry’s daughter, Amina Ajmal, was held against her will in Pakistan for more than three years by relatives at her father’s orders.

During her captivity, Ajmal, an American citizen, was forced into an arranged marriage with a Pakistani national for the purpose of obtaining a U.S. visa for that individual, authorities said.

Ajmal managed to eventually flee Pakistan and return to the U.S. with the help of a cousin and State Department officials.

Prosecutors say Choudhry, who did not know his daughter’s whereabouts, threatened her in recorded telephone calls, saying he would plan the murder of her cousin if she did not return to the family’s Brooklyn home.

After his daughter’s refusal to return home, her cousin’s father and sister were shot and killed in Pakistan on Feb. 25, according to U.S. officials.

Witnesses reported seeing Choudhry’s brother standing over the bodies with a gun.

Agents from HSI and the Diplomatic Security Service placed 60-year-old Choudhry under arrest in Brooklyn later that same day.

‘As alleged, the defendant viewed his daughter as a commodity to be bartered.

‘When she escaped those holding her overseas and fled to safety in the U.S., the defendant enlisted his confederates to retaliate against those who had helped her to freedom.

‘As a result of his plot, two innocent people were murdered in Pakistan,’ U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said in a press release Wednesday.

‘We are committed to ensuring that people in the United States who export murder abroad will be brought to justice.’

Islamabad, Pakistan: Christian residents of Iqbal Town were allegedly beaten up by unidentified men on Monday evening for participating in protests against Sunday’s carnage in a Peshawar church.

An Iqbal Town resident, who requested anonymity, said he was an eyewitness to the episode. The resident, said several men thrashed seven or eight Christian youths with batons outside the Unitarian Church in the neighbourhood. The men had their faces covered, the resident said. Some of the victims, including Pastor Safir, were missing, the resident claimed.

Another Christian resident of the neighbourhood alleged police complicity in the incident. The second resident claimed police were trying to ‘teach’ the Christian community a lesson for two consecutive days of protests on the Islamabad Highway. The resident alleged police had stationed a mobile van near the area’s taxi stand and were nabbing any Christians that went nearby.

Iqbal Town has a significant Christian population and the community has led some of the strongest protest rallies in the capital over the past couple of days.

Officers at the Shehzad Town police station said they had not received any reports about the thrashing incident. They denied detaining Christians but said police personnel have been deployed at Iqbal Town because of the recent protests.

The largest Indonesian mosque in the United States will be constructed in Houston, Texas on a 5,142 acre plot of land that was purchased on 08 August 2013 by the Indonesian American Muslim Community (IAMC) for $540,023.00/us.

According to a press release by the Indonesian Consulate General received on Monday in Houston, the mosque will be constructed on Old Richmond Road in Sugarland, just southwest of Houston City.

Chairman of the IAMC, Zulfan Efendi, said the land in Houston was purchased with donations from Indonesians living in the United States, particularly those living in Houston.

He added that the mosque will have dormitories, stores, a gymnasium and other facilities. He predicts the construction of the mosque will be completed by March 2016.

Did you know.. there are already more than 77 mosques in Houston Texas?